Trump tariffs ruled illegal

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Trade court agreed that Trump exceeded his authority to impose tariffs

Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, is one of the lawyers who filed the successful suit against Trump’s tariffs on behalf of five US businesses that import goods.

In a response to the sweeping victory on Wednesday in the US Court of International Trade, which ruled that all of Trump’s tariffs are illegal and must be removed, Somin wrote in a post on the legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy that the three-judge panel had agreed with him that the president simply does not have the authority to impose tariffs without the consent of Congress.

Somin drew attention to this part of the court’s unanimous opinion:

The Constitution assigns Congress the exclusive powers to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises,” and to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations.” U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cls. 1, 3. The question in the two cases before the court is whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (“IEEPA”) delegates these powers to the President in the form of authority to impose unlimited tariffs on goods from nearly every country the court does not read IEEPA to confer such unbounded authority and sets aside the challenged tariffs imposed thereunder.

“From the very beginning”, Somin wrote, "“I have contended that the virtually limitless nature of the authority claimed by Trump is a key reason why courts must strike down the tariffs.”